It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
Anne Sexton
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Live or die, but don't poison everything.
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
The joy that isn't shared dies young.
Death's in the good-bye.
God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.
Madness is a waste of time. It creates nothing.
Even though I'm often crazy - and I am, and I know it - still I fight it because I know how sterile, how futile, how bleak... nothing grows from it, and you, meanwhile, only grow into it like a snail.
I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middle-class dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.
The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
In a dream you are never eighty.
Even without wars, life is dangerous.
God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
I want to be a child and not a mother, and I feel guilty about this.
I am not immortal. Faustus and I are the also-ran.
I wrote some serious stuff in high school; however, I hadn't been exposed to any of the major poets, not even the minor ones... I read nothing but Sara Teasdale.
My mother was top billing in our house.
Most poets are mad. It doesn't qualify us for anything.
Until I was twenty-eight, I had a kind of buried self who didn't know she could do anything but make white sauce and diaper babies. I didn't know I had any creative depths.
Need is not quite belief.
These poets (fans of whatever) should be contacting other young poets on their way - not those who have made it, who sit on a star and then have plenty of problems: usually no money, usually the fear their own writing is going down the sink hole.
Before I was married, I had never washed one dish or seen how you fried an egg or baking a potato.
I said to my doctor at the beginning, 'I'm no good; I can't do anything. I'm dumb.' He suggested I try educating myself by listening to Boston's educational TV station. He said I had a perfectly good mind.
